Within the new world of social media, a new archetype has emerged-one that mingles the complexities of motherhood with the appeal of alcohol as a panacea for stress. Come forth, the ‘wine mom’: this is the stuff of cultural phenomena-like proliferation via hashtags and humorous memes, staples in online communities, especially on Instagram and Facebook. But what lies beneath the surface of these seemingly innocuous portrayals?
These are the implications of results from a recent study published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media, which has illuminated what that might mean for the ways in which social norms around maternal alcohol consumption are set in ways that could promote unsafe drinking behaviors.
Led by University of Missouri doctoral candidate and graduate instructor Emily Lorenz, this new study gets to the root of wine mom culture. A mom and scholar herself, Lorenz was interested in the omnipresent social media discourse that jokingly positions alcohol as a necessary tool to survive the challenges of motherhood. Her research aimed at finding what influence this persuasion would have on the attitude of mothers towards alcohol and health consequences. Since consumption of alcohol is directly related to a higher risk of physical and psychological sickness, the implications of her findings are very critical.
The experiment in the Lorenz study was an online one, which has 330 mothers recruited through social media and mom-oriented groups. I randomly assigned these participants to three conditions, one in which there would be exposure to the content related to a ‘wine mom’, another group of exposure to the ‘sober mom’ content, and yet another condition with a neutral thematic motherhood content. For ‘wine mom’ and ‘sober mom’, content was sourced respectively by the respective hashtags to assure balanced mixes of text or image-based posts. Following exposure, participants completed items assessing their social comparison orientation, prior exposure to alcohol messaging, drinking identity, and current norms about alcohol.
The results were revealing. Mothers who had been exposed to ‘wine mom’ content reported stronger beliefs that their social circle expects and approves of drinking as part of motherhood. For those who had regularly encountered the messaging on wine mom prior to entering the study, this was even truer. More importantly, their research found that prior exposure to wine mom culture through television affects mothers’ perceptions about how prevalent drinking is among their peers. Those with low prior exposure believed heavy drinking was less prevalent among mothers. This implied that, in the absence of any prior normalization from television, experimental exposure by itself did not alter beliefs about prevalence of drinking.
The investigation by Lorenz also highlighted the role of social comparison orientation in shaping normative beliefs about alcohol. Mothers who were more inclined to make comparisons between themselves and others saw drinking as being more prevalent, whether they were in the experimental or control group. That disposition tended to emerge more distinctly in the control group, indicating that individuals with high levels of social comparison may assume certain attitudes or behaviors, such as drinking, are more common than they, in fact, are, regardless of media exposure.
The results were revealing. Mothers who had been exposed to ‘wine mom’ content reported stronger beliefs that their social circle expects and approves of drinking as part of motherhood. For those who had regularly encountered the messaging on wine mom prior to entering the study, this was even truer. More importantly, their research found that prior exposure to wine mom culture through television affects mothers’ perceptions about how prevalent drinking is among their peers. Those with low prior exposure believed heavy drinking was less prevalent among mothers. This implied that, in the absence of any prior normalization from television, experimental exposure by itself did not alter beliefs about prevalence of drinking.
The investigation by Lorenz also highlighted the role of social comparison orientation in shaping normative beliefs about alcohol. Mothers who were more inclined to make comparisons between themselves and others saw drinking as being more prevalent, whether they were in the experimental or control group. That disposition tended to emerge more distinctly in the control group, indicating that individuals with high levels of social comparison may assume certain attitudes or behaviors, such as drinking, are more common than they, in fact, are, regardless of media exposure.
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Rethinking Wine-The Shift From Mommy Wine Culture to Mindful Sobriety
